Ban Zhao

The Book of Han, the official history of the Former Han dynasty and the second of imperial China's standard dynastic histories, was begun by Ban Biao and continued by his son Ban Gu, who was imprisoned and died in 92 CE with the work still unfinished, its treatises on astronomy, chronology and genealogical tables in particular left incomplete. Emperor He turned to Ban Gu's sister, Ban Zhao, to complete it, summoning her to the imperial library specifically for that purpose. Completing a dynastic history's technical tables required exactly the kind of specialized scholarly training, in astronomy and calendrical calculation as well as classical literature, that Ban Zhao had received within her family's scholarly household, and her work brought the Book of Han to the finished form that later Chinese historiography treated as the template for how a dynasty's official history should be written.

Her standing at court extended well beyond textual scholarship. Emperor He appointed her tutor to the women of the imperial harem and the ladies in waiting, who addressed her by the honorific Cao Dagu, drawing on her husband's surname Cao and a term of respect for an accomplished woman. Among her students was Deng Sui, a young woman she taught history, the classics and astronomy, who later became Empress Dowager Deng and, once installed as regent for a child emperor, is recorded as having consulted Ban Zhao directly on matters of court policy, giving a woman formally credentialed only as a tutor and historian a documented voice in Eastern Han political affairs.

Late in her life, Ban Zhao wrote Nujie, known in English as Lessons for Women, a short treatise addressed to the women of her own family but copied and circulated far beyond it almost immediately. The text laid out a program of female conduct built around humility, deference to husband and in-laws, careful speech and diligent household management, virtues explicitly framed in Confucian terms as the female counterpart to the obligations Confucian ethics placed on men. At the same time, and less often emphasized in later summaries of the work, Ban Zhao argued directly for the education of girls, on the practical grounds that a woman could not be expected to fulfill duties she had never been taught, and that families who educated their sons while leaving their daughters ignorant were acting against their own household's interests.

That combination, a demand for women's education paired with an insistence on female submission within the household, gave Lessons for Women an unusually long institutional afterlife. It was copied into later compendia of instruction for women, cited by teachers and family heads for roughly two thousand years after its composition, and became one of the most consistently reproduced statements of Confucian gender norms in Chinese history, shaping expectations of female behavior long after the specific household circumstances that had prompted Ban Zhao to write it were forgotten. Modern scholars reading the text alongside her own career, as historian, astronomer and court advisor, have noted the tension between the constrained role Lessons for Women prescribes and the far less constrained life its author actually led.